17 ms·

LA’s new trains have not lessened the time spent stuck in traffic

88 points by edward 7y ago

webkike 7y ago
I would love to use LA public transport but it’s simply not usable to get most places I want to go. I live a block away from an expo line and I can’t even make it all the way to little Tokyo without making a transfer. Getting to West Hollywood via the metro is basically not possible. The only solution to this problem is a lot more lines
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Exactly. And if it can get you where you want to go, you have to transfer through multiple buses or taxis. The hassle kind of burns you out and you just want something simpler. Unlike other cities, there's not a whole lot in downtown that I need to visit on a regular basis. Most of what I want to do is peripheral to the actual city of LA. Everything is so spread out, and there really isn't much we can do to undo that at this point. We're never going to be the pedestrian paradise that is San Francisco. (I don't want to live in SF again, but boy was it nice to be able to walk and take light rail everywhere) I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.
  - butterthebuddha 7y ago
    > I don't want to live in SF again Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ravenstine 7y ago
      I'll boil it down to a few things: - The rampant homelessness and mental illness - Cost of living - Feces and urine everywhere - Lots of rats and cockroaches - Rotting garbage in the streets - Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA. - Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question. It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
      - bxparks 7y ago
        Yup, we left SF for pretty much the same reasons: 1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem. 2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80. 3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty. I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
  - bproven 7y ago
    yeah - saw that a lot in bay area. Not that CO / Denver has great transit, but their solution is to have transit police on every train. They check tickets/passes and do rounds. Which does seem to reduce this...
  - Moru 7y ago
    It's not illegal to be sick and I guess the police do this sort of short trip because what else can they do?
- mgolawala 7y ago
  The issue with LA is the low density sprawl. It would simply be cost prohibitive to build and run a public transport infrastructure that would cover such a large area and transport you around quickly. At least with today's technologies and costs. If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Isn't it just as cost-prohibitive to build and run a private transport infrastructure? Consider the cost of all the overbuilt roads, the cars on those roads, the human life wasted in traffic... Yet, LA has obviously done so. Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
    - mgolawala 7y ago
      Agreed. I don't think the current situation is better. Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
      - deaddodo 7y ago
        > However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
- groby_b 7y ago
  What OP said. Just to throw out an example, if you want to get from Culver City (somewhat night-spotty place, and lots of new companies sprouting up) to Encino (somewhat affordable place on the other side of the hills, where rent won't completely kill you)? That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses. That doesn't really qualify as public transportation. Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA. The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"
  - jppope 7y ago
    Yea but people in the rest of the country would be blown away by the travel times by car as well. Irvine to Santa Monica leaving at 7:30am is 2.5 - 3 hours. Total distance 45 Miles? You can drive from Kansas City to Omaha in roughly the same time
    - cylentwolf 7y ago
      Yeah but you won't pass as many people. The density of SoCal is high but it is spread out which defeats public transportation. Maybe once we get some kind of automated bus system and bus lanes this could be less of a hassle but I doubt it.
  - tomjakubowski 7y ago
    You're wildly exaggerating. It takes just about 20 minutes to get from Culver City to the end of the line in Santa Monica. It doesn't even take an hour to traverse the entire Expo Line between DTLA and Santa Monica, about fifty minutes. If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes. Timetables: https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_1571341545.pdf https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_15...
    - groby_b 7y ago
- shams93 7y ago
  For a lot of areas the one available bus only goes downtown for example to get from glendale to burbank can take 5 hours on the bus going through several buses to get downtown then you take the redline to north hollywood and have another series of buses up to burbank, meanwhile by car burbank is 15 minutes away from glendale.
- thewebcount 7y ago
  Not only that, the time to take public transport is way worse than driving. If it were a 5-15 minute difference to get from point A to point B, OK, I would do it. But for me, I can get to/from work in ~20 minutes. I could also take the bus and it would be 50 minutes one way. That means an extra hour out of my day to take public transportation. I have too much going on to lose an hour a day. The extra time spent in traffic is obviously not as bad as the extra time spent on public transit, so why would I take it?
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    It can work if you use the time on the bus doing work. You can't do work while driving.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      I don't have space on the bus to do anything except look at my phone, or maybe read a book.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  The Regional Connector project, responsible for the giant holes currently in the streets of Little Tokyo, will directly join the Expo and Gold lines together, which will solve many of these "west Downtown/east Downtown" transfer issues. Due to open in 2022. https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/ https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/
  - webkike 7y ago
    2 years for a mile of line is not very encouraging for the future of this city
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      The delay is entirely due to private businesses that failed to properly disclose active utility lines. The work to reroute those lines resulted in a 2 year delay.
- bproven 7y ago
  yeah sadly it is pretty typical of US transit buildouts - half ass vision and implementation and then everyone wonders why it fails.
- takeda 7y ago
  Same here, I would use it, but then drive to a near station is same as driving directly. I like though that is expanding, so maybe one day I can use it.
- thinkcontext 7y ago
  The longer game is to encourage denser redevelopment around the stations so that they become places more people want to go.
psychometry 7y ago
If they would just come to peace with removing some parking, they could convert slow bus lines to fast ones through protected lanes, signal priority, and other cheap measures.
- dhduwnsjsj 7y ago
  Unlikely anytime soon, California transit development is held back by the hippies and soccer moms clamoring for green everything. My city took away a ton of parking from a main road only to add dedicated, environmentally friendly, bike lanes. Nevermind that four cyclists an hour use the lanes tops or that it could have just as easily been a dedicated bus lane and done some actual good for people with jobs. But this way we're encouraging people to, like, take care of themselves man!
  - duxup 7y ago
    Generally in my experience the folks pushing green options (this is admittedly a large group) tend to be fans of busses...
    - montagg 7y ago
      I’m on a neighborhood council in LA, and this is not consistently the case. You often see this flip when it comes to supporting denser development, especially where it intersects with removing single family homes or rent controlled apartments. The willingness to remove parking to get some other benefit for the community evaporates. They’re making tradeoffs that make internal sense, but it does mean you don’t just see soccer moms saying no to removing available parking. It’s sometimes hippies vs urban planners.
      - duxup 7y ago
        I feel like denser housing is always a wildcard as far as any of the folks interested goes. Bussing much less so.
        7y ago
kkhire 7y ago
'Getting around the city' culture is just different here in LA. There's folks in NYC who make half million a year and take the subway several times a day. In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!
- twblalock 7y ago
  Unlike the LA system, the New York subway can get riders to most parts of the city. The LA system is only useful for a very limited set of routes.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Public transit is supposed to be cheaper than a car...
  - Forgivenessizer 7y ago
    Public transportation's only certain benefit is that people who simply cannot drive are able to get from A to B.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      That is one benefit. People who can't drive are stuck with whatever you give them, and will figure out whatever convoluted system required. They all dream of the time/day they can drive. This one is also mandated by law (US ADA) - if you provide any form of public transit you must provide for the disabled. If we ignore the legally required para transit (most expensive) service for those who cannot drive is the cheapest you can get. There are other benefits that transit can buy. However they are less certain. When you try to attract someone who could drive you have the hard problem of providing service where and when people are to where and when they want to be.
      - Forgivenessizer 7y ago
        Why do you think I got flagged? You seem to agree with me. But why flagged? It makes no sense!!!
giantrobot 7y ago
That's because the trains in LA suck for actually getting anywhere. The city is so spread out and car oriented the trains are useless for most people. Many train stops in LA proper are at retail/consumer locations rather than commercial centers where most people work. So you take a train into the city and you then need to catch a bus or cab to where you actually need to go. So you skipped some freeway traffic but get stuck in road traffic. It's more of a pain if you're in the suburbs around LA. Because of the sprawl the trip from your home to a train station isn't a walkable distance. If you take public transit for that portion of your commute you're not seeing any sort of time savings. If you drive to a train station you have all the expenses of a car and the crappy commute time. Because you basically need a car in most of Southern California you might as well use the freeways. The traffic sucks but at least you have your own radio, AC, and ability to get off and grab a coffee. The sprawl imposes a sort of fixed commute time for any given distance. You might as well be relatively comfortable in that commute.
- bsder 7y ago
  It also doesn't help that the trains are so terribly slow. I semi-regularly have to go from San Diego to Orange County. I could put a car at the Orange County terminus point so I'm not impacted by the bad connectivity to the stations themselves. It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. You'd be better off driving to Solana Beach, except that most of the rush hour traffic issues are between San Diego and Solana Beach. So, once you reach Solana Beach, you might as well drive the rest of the way. It also doesn't help that parking at Old Town is a disaster--you either get there by 7:00AM or you're not getting parking. Um, if I leave before 7AM, San Diego to Irvine is roughly a 1 hour drive. On top of that, the train is semi-regularly stopped because someone decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of it. This means that your train is stopped 3+ hours AND YOU CAN'T LEAVE. Why would I take the train at that point?
  - musicale 7y ago
    > It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. The schedule seems to indicate that it takes 11-12 minutes to get from San Diego to Solana beach. Where is the extra time coming from? How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak) ?
mayneack 7y ago
I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in traffic. Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that. The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  I live in Orange County and commute to La Mirada (only ~13 miles away). The bus routes are so inefficient that it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work by bus. Biking would be faster (although significantly more stressful and dangerous). Some areas just need to add more and better routes.
  - jppope 7y ago
    Orange County and the IE are some of the worst public transit in the country. LA's trains/ Metrolink are actually an improvement over sitting on the 10 by quite a bit. The accessibility to the metrolink and the trains have a lot to be desired though in the OC and the IE...
    - dhosek 7y ago
      When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).
- naravara 7y ago
  How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or if there are delays? In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.
pm24601 7y ago
The article completely misses the point of public transit. Transit is NOT about reducing congestion. Induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) clearly means that some people will driving so long the congestion is within their tolerance level. Public Transit is all about giving choices to people AND enabling people to get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of congestion. For my family, I have been fortunate enough that the last 15 years or so I have been able to take public transit to my jobs. This has enable my family to use a single car and save tens of thousands. This is significant money for me and even more significant for someone making less than I do. Public transit enables workers to keep more of what they earn because they don't have to spend money on gas, car repairs, and they don't have surprise expenses related to driving all the time. Public transit is NEVER about congestion. If the goal is "solving" congestion then: * ban cars (Market Street in SF, 14th Street in NYC (https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transportation-bus-lane-transit-priority https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transport...) * have an economic collapse * reduce parking options * congestion pricing ... etc...
- Forgivenessizer 7y ago
  ban cars LOL. Do you have any idea what you are saying?
  - dang 7y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  Adding capacity doesn't cause demand. "Induced" demand is just latent demand that became measurable when we reduced the backpressure in the system, and it ends as soon as we adequately serve all the latent demand we have. But that probably costs more per capita than a car, so we aren't voting to do it.
- 7y ago
johanam 7y ago
Even in times of low traffic, patrol cars are known to slow down the flow of cars in order to induce congestion. They do it because when there are so many cars on the freeway, it’s safer if the vehicles move along slowly. It seems that with our current infrastructure, even if we could reduce the number of car users it would not be by such a margin that it would become safe enough to not have these “traffic breaks”. https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8 https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8
- karthikb 7y ago
  The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every 4-5 years.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    It's just anecdotal, but I often saw it done in LA; weekly to monthly. Since I would get stuck in them I'd often seem them start or end them. I never once saw any correlation to road debris or emergency services. Any staging for construction or emergency services were done with a slow moving truck dropping cones or flares put down in a zipper-like fashion, corralling cars into open lanes or into exits.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Yeah I see that kinda stuff at least a few times a year in the Bay Area. There's so much detritus on the roads I imagine they're just trying to remove the biggest of the hazards.
  - bradlys 7y ago
    > The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every 4-5 years. I've seen "traffic breaks" done to catch motorcyclists. Completely stops traffic with hundreds and hundreds of cars just to catch one guy speeding - not really worth it imo. Sometimes it's for debris but see plenty of pulling over too...
majormajor 7y ago
I can't read the article, but am very curious about how they accounted for overall growth. That new Expo Line tends to be pretty packed at rush hour. But that east/west commute continues to get more crowded overall. There have been ever-more apartments and offices opening up along that line for the past 6+ years, so it's no surprise traffic gets worse too.
pfranz 7y ago
Most of the article is behind a paywall so I couldn't read the whole thing. I hate the argument I often hear that "more lanes were added, time spent in traffic hasn't changed." As long as ridership is up, throughput increased while latency stayed the same. A public transit system takes decades of investment to see fruition. This really clicked for me when I was in London and saw a sign saying a transit stop was closed for the next 3 years. That has to be detrimental for the businesses, people renting, and real estate owners who were established there. A business lease averages 3-5 years. So you'd need zoning laws to change, real estate to be built, a business owner willing to commit to 3-5 years, and foot traffic and commerce. I can't imagine any infrastructure project that would improve traffic--only a recession.
drivingmenuts 7y ago
I consider The Economist to be a high-brow, high-status publication, but when I see them misspelling in the title, I have to reconsider. “Loth” is not a word. “Loathe” is the word they’re looking for. Find a better educated editor, y’all.
- bwanab 7y ago
  Loth is a valid British form of loathe: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loth https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loth
  - Forgivenessizer 7y ago
    interesting. What will the boffins think up next?
  - pasttense01 7y ago
    Doesn't The Economist change spellings between British and American editions? For example: "color"--American and "colour"--British?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bluGill 7y ago
That is expected, as any transit planner can tell you. Transit only makes a difference to traffic at the very edges of rush hour. For every person who gets out of their single occupancy car there is enough space for one person to leave just a little latter and still make it in time, which in turns leaves their space for someone else until finally you are out of rush hour entirely and there is nobody to take that time/space slot. Or to put it a different way: everybody wants to arrive to leave at 7:30am and arrive at 8:00am. (you can subtract a few minutes from the leave time for people who live close to work). Anybody working some other schedule (who has a choice of when to work) is doing it because they are avoiding traffic. Thus if transit makes traffic a little better someone on the edge will adjust their schedule to account for that and bring traffic back to where it was. Until you get to a city where rush hour lasts for 15 minutes transit will not make a measurable difference in time spent in traffic.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  In general yes, but in this case the trains are not being used: > Even as its budget has expanded, the number of people actually using public transport in la has collapsed. Total ridership is down almost a quarter since 2013. Three in four Angelenos travel to work on their own in a car, the highest figure ever.
  - downerending 7y ago
    Recently stayed in a hotel in LA that had a direct view onto a light rail station. (Cool!) I glanced out the window from time to time over several days and never saw a single train. That suggests that they're not running often enough to be useful to real people. Train, bus, whatever--if I have to wait longer than eight minutes on average, it's useless. (And don't even get me started on the geniuses that decided that light rail shouldn't have an LAX terminal.)
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      We're you staying in Long Beach? That line was down for 9 months for a complete renovation.
whalesalad 7y ago
Trains can get you to like 2% of LA... that is why they're hardly used.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Downtown, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena, long Beach, and Hollywood. So the important 2%.
blackrock 7y ago
Maybe they should just let the public transit riders ride for free? Those people will then bear with the hassles of using public transportation for the rest who needs to use their cars. The city might even see a surge in commerce, from people who can go to distant locations via public transit, that they wouldn’t otherwise bother going to by car.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Generally not. Most people are willing to pay a little for it, and people who pay for their service are harder to justify cutting service to when times get tight.
dkarl 7y ago
I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have taken 15 minutes by Lyft. About twenty minutes of that was spent walking and waiting in <40ºF weather, not a big deal if you're properly dressed, but I know that's something many people will not tolerate if they have a choice. Ten minutes of it was apparently due to unreliable service; Google Maps had me get off to make a connection and but quickly rerouted me to get back on the same line I was on (luckily high frequency, hence only 10 minutes lost) because the next bus on the connecting line was half an hour away. I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood. I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.
- rayiner 7y ago
  This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are under 30 minutes: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. Just 7% of public transit commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S. public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5% take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public transit): https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell.... I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
  - 7y ago
cs702 7y ago
Any reduction in commute time due to new infrastructure, capacity increases, new technology, or other improvements, always proves temporary, as average commute times in large population centers gradually converge to Marchetti's Constant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant In the words of Bertrand Russell: "Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area -- effectually cancels out the gain."[a] See also: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-city-size-transportation-urban-planning-history/597055/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-... [a] As quoted on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
- helen___keller 7y ago
  Another way of looking at it, building transit doesn't get anybody to work faster, but it does allow you to scale population density, which in turn allows you to build more housing for a region that may be in a housing crunch. If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour. Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.
- carapace 7y ago
  One of the wild things in Smil's "Energy and Civilization, a History" is that cars generally don't do better than walking if you factor in the hours spent working to pay for the expenses of owning and operating the car. Your total miles travelled per hour spent is roughly the same!
fastaguy88 7y ago
While there seems to be a lot of comments suggesting that no-one uses the LA metro because it's too short and too inconvenient, ridership statistics suggest otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr... points out that LA is the 9th most used subway system in the US, with riders/mile of subway beating out both the Washington DC Metro and Chicago's L, which are the 2nd and 3rd most heavily used subway systems. So while most of the commenter's here do not find it useful, about 140,000 people per day do use it, despite it being only 17 miles long.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  Well given that LA is the second largest city in the country by population, that seems to support the idea that it’s heavily under utilized.
pacomerh 7y ago
I live in Culver City and go to work to Santa Monica using the expo line, and its perfect. But I do understand the routes do not cover important areas. There's still a big gap around West Hollywood for ex.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
api 7y ago
That's because LA is growing. It would be a lot worse without the trains.

88 points by edward 7y ago

I would love to use LA public transport but it’s simply not usable to get most places I want to go. I live a block away from an expo line and I can’t even make it all the way to little Tokyo without making a transfer. Getting to West Hollywood via the metro is basically not possible. The only solution to this problem is a lot more lines

ravenstine 7y ago
Exactly. And if it can get you where you want to go, you have to transfer through multiple buses or taxis. The hassle kind of burns you out and you just want something simpler. Unlike other cities, there's not a whole lot in downtown that I need to visit on a regular basis. Most of what I want to do is peripheral to the actual city of LA. Everything is so spread out, and there really isn't much we can do to undo that at this point. We're never going to be the pedestrian paradise that is San Francisco. (I don't want to live in SF again, but boy was it nice to be able to walk and take light rail everywhere) I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.
- butterthebuddha 7y ago
  > I don't want to live in SF again Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    I'll boil it down to a few things: - The rampant homelessness and mental illness - Cost of living - Feces and urine everywhere - Lots of rats and cockroaches - Rotting garbage in the streets - Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA. - Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question. It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
    - bxparks 7y ago
      Yup, we left SF for pretty much the same reasons: 1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem. 2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80. 3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty. I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
- bproven 7y ago
  yeah - saw that a lot in bay area. Not that CO / Denver has great transit, but their solution is to have transit police on every train. They check tickets/passes and do rounds. Which does seem to reduce this...
- Moru 7y ago
  It's not illegal to be sick and I guess the police do this sort of short trip because what else can they do?
mgolawala 7y ago
The issue with LA is the low density sprawl. It would simply be cost prohibitive to build and run a public transport infrastructure that would cover such a large area and transport you around quickly. At least with today's technologies and costs. If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
- vkou 7y ago
  Isn't it just as cost-prohibitive to build and run a private transport infrastructure? Consider the cost of all the overbuilt roads, the cars on those roads, the human life wasted in traffic... Yet, LA has obviously done so. Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
  - mgolawala 7y ago
    Agreed. I don't think the current situation is better. Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
    - deaddodo 7y ago
      > However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach. And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
groby_b 7y ago
What OP said. Just to throw out an example, if you want to get from Culver City (somewhat night-spotty place, and lots of new companies sprouting up) to Encino (somewhat affordable place on the other side of the hills, where rent won't completely kill you)? That's a ~17 mile drive. Try take public transportation, plan for 2.5 hours or so. With a 20 minute walk in between the three buses. That doesn't really qualify as public transportation. Culver City to Santa Monica? It's 8 miles, of course it takes an hour. Using the expo line. Same for CC->Downtown LA. The expo line is good. For a very limited set of destinations, and a very limited set of starting points. It's like saying "we shipped five pounds of flour to $POOR_NATION, why are people still hungry?"
- jppope 7y ago
  Yea but people in the rest of the country would be blown away by the travel times by car as well. Irvine to Santa Monica leaving at 7:30am is 2.5 - 3 hours. Total distance 45 Miles? You can drive from Kansas City to Omaha in roughly the same time
  - cylentwolf 7y ago
    Yeah but you won't pass as many people. The density of SoCal is high but it is spread out which defeats public transportation. Maybe once we get some kind of automated bus system and bus lanes this could be less of a hassle but I doubt it.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  You're wildly exaggerating. It takes just about 20 minutes to get from Culver City to the end of the line in Santa Monica. It doesn't even take an hour to traverse the entire Expo Line between DTLA and Santa Monica, about fifty minutes. If Metro were able to get traffic signal priority for Expo, traveling the whole line would be about 35 minutes. Timetables: https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_1571341545.pdf https://media.metro.net/documents/line-schedules/line-806_15...
  - groby_b 7y ago
shams93 7y ago
For a lot of areas the one available bus only goes downtown for example to get from glendale to burbank can take 5 hours on the bus going through several buses to get downtown then you take the redline to north hollywood and have another series of buses up to burbank, meanwhile by car burbank is 15 minutes away from glendale.
thewebcount 7y ago
Not only that, the time to take public transport is way worse than driving. If it were a 5-15 minute difference to get from point A to point B, OK, I would do it. But for me, I can get to/from work in ~20 minutes. I could also take the bus and it would be 50 minutes one way. That means an extra hour out of my day to take public transportation. I have too much going on to lose an hour a day. The extra time spent in traffic is obviously not as bad as the extra time spent on public transit, so why would I take it?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  It can work if you use the time on the bus doing work. You can't do work while driving.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    I don't have space on the bus to do anything except look at my phone, or maybe read a book.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tomjakubowski 7y ago
The Regional Connector project, responsible for the giant holes currently in the streets of Little Tokyo, will directly join the Expo and Gold lines together, which will solve many of these "west Downtown/east Downtown" transfer issues. Due to open in 2022. https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/ https://www.metro.net/projects/connector/
- webkike 7y ago
  2 years for a mile of line is not very encouraging for the future of this city
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    The delay is entirely due to private businesses that failed to properly disclose active utility lines. The work to reroute those lines resulted in a 2 year delay.
bproven 7y ago
yeah sadly it is pretty typical of US transit buildouts - half ass vision and implementation and then everyone wonders why it fails.
takeda 7y ago
Same here, I would use it, but then drive to a near station is same as driving directly. I like though that is expanding, so maybe one day I can use it.
thinkcontext 7y ago
The longer game is to encourage denser redevelopment around the stations so that they become places more people want to go.

psychometry 7y ago

If they would just come to peace with removing some parking, they could convert slow bus lines to fast ones through protected lanes, signal priority, and other cheap measures.

dhduwnsjsj 7y ago
Unlikely anytime soon, California transit development is held back by the hippies and soccer moms clamoring for green everything. My city took away a ton of parking from a main road only to add dedicated, environmentally friendly, bike lanes. Nevermind that four cyclists an hour use the lanes tops or that it could have just as easily been a dedicated bus lane and done some actual good for people with jobs. But this way we're encouraging people to, like, take care of themselves man!
- duxup 7y ago
  Generally in my experience the folks pushing green options (this is admittedly a large group) tend to be fans of busses...
  - montagg 7y ago
    I’m on a neighborhood council in LA, and this is not consistently the case. You often see this flip when it comes to supporting denser development, especially where it intersects with removing single family homes or rent controlled apartments. The willingness to remove parking to get some other benefit for the community evaporates. They’re making tradeoffs that make internal sense, but it does mean you don’t just see soccer moms saying no to removing available parking. It’s sometimes hippies vs urban planners.
    - duxup 7y ago
      I feel like denser housing is always a wildcard as far as any of the folks interested goes. Bussing much less so.
      - 7y ago

kkhire 7y ago

'Getting around the city' culture is just different here in LA. There's folks in NYC who make half million a year and take the subway several times a day. In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!

twblalock 7y ago
Unlike the LA system, the New York subway can get riders to most parts of the city. The LA system is only useful for a very limited set of routes.
garmaine 7y ago
Public transit is supposed to be cheaper than a car...
- Forgivenessizer 7y ago
  Public transportation's only certain benefit is that people who simply cannot drive are able to get from A to B.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    That is one benefit. People who can't drive are stuck with whatever you give them, and will figure out whatever convoluted system required. They all dream of the time/day they can drive. This one is also mandated by law (US ADA) - if you provide any form of public transit you must provide for the disabled. If we ignore the legally required para transit (most expensive) service for those who cannot drive is the cheapest you can get. There are other benefits that transit can buy. However they are less certain. When you try to attract someone who could drive you have the hard problem of providing service where and when people are to where and when they want to be.
    - Forgivenessizer 7y ago
      Why do you think I got flagged? You seem to agree with me. But why flagged? It makes no sense!!!

giantrobot 7y ago

That's because the trains in LA suck for actually getting anywhere. The city is so spread out and car oriented the trains are useless for most people. Many train stops in LA proper are at retail/consumer locations rather than commercial centers where most people work. So you take a train into the city and you then need to catch a bus or cab to where you actually need to go. So you skipped some freeway traffic but get stuck in road traffic. It's more of a pain if you're in the suburbs around LA. Because of the sprawl the trip from your home to a train station isn't a walkable distance. If you take public transit for that portion of your commute you're not seeing any sort of time savings. If you drive to a train station you have all the expenses of a car and the crappy commute time. Because you basically need a car in most of Southern California you might as well use the freeways. The traffic sucks but at least you have your own radio, AC, and ability to get off and grab a coffee. The sprawl imposes a sort of fixed commute time for any given distance. You might as well be relatively comfortable in that commute.

bsder 7y ago
It also doesn't help that the trains are so terribly slow. I semi-regularly have to go from San Diego to Orange County. I could put a car at the Orange County terminus point so I'm not impacted by the bad connectivity to the stations themselves. It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. You'd be better off driving to Solana Beach, except that most of the rush hour traffic issues are between San Diego and Solana Beach. So, once you reach Solana Beach, you might as well drive the rest of the way. It also doesn't help that parking at Old Town is a disaster--you either get there by 7:00AM or you're not getting parking. Um, if I leave before 7AM, San Diego to Irvine is roughly a 1 hour drive. On top of that, the train is semi-regularly stopped because someone decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of it. This means that your train is stopped 3+ hours AND YOU CAN'T LEAVE. Why would I take the train at that point?
- musicale 7y ago
  > It takes almost 2 hours to so from San Diego to Irvine by train--most of it spent getting from San Diego to Solana Beach. The schedule seems to indicate that it takes 11-12 minutes to get from San Diego to Solana beach. Where is the extra time coming from? How synchronized is local transit (MTS trolley or bus) with commuter rail (Amtrak) ?

mayneack 7y ago

I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in traffic. Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that. The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.

CameronNemo 7y ago
I live in Orange County and commute to La Mirada (only ~13 miles away). The bus routes are so inefficient that it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work by bus. Biking would be faster (although significantly more stressful and dangerous). Some areas just need to add more and better routes.
- jppope 7y ago
  Orange County and the IE are some of the worst public transit in the country. LA's trains/ Metrolink are actually an improvement over sitting on the 10 by quite a bit. The accessibility to the metrolink and the trains have a lot to be desired though in the OC and the IE...
  - dhosek 7y ago
    When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).
naravara 7y ago
How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or if there are delays? In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.

pm24601 7y ago

The article completely misses the point of public transit. Transit is NOT about reducing congestion. Induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) clearly means that some people will driving so long the congestion is within their tolerance level. Public Transit is all about giving choices to people AND enabling people to get to jobs that they couldn't get to otherwise because of congestion. For my family, I have been fortunate enough that the last 15 years or so I have been able to take public transit to my jobs. This has enable my family to use a single car and save tens of thousands. This is significant money for me and even more significant for someone making less than I do. Public transit enables workers to keep more of what they earn because they don't have to spend money on gas, car repairs, and they don't have surprise expenses related to driving all the time. Public transit is NEVER about congestion. If the goal is "solving" congestion then: * ban cars (Market Street in SF, 14th Street in NYC (https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transportation-bus-lane-transit-priority https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/18/20919729/new-york-transport...) * have an economic collapse * reduce parking options * congestion pricing ... etc...

Forgivenessizer 7y ago
ban cars LOL. Do you have any idea what you are saying?
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
erik_seaberg 7y ago
Adding capacity doesn't cause demand. "Induced" demand is just latent demand that became measurable when we reduced the backpressure in the system, and it ends as soon as we adequately serve all the latent demand we have. But that probably costs more per capita than a car, so we aren't voting to do it.
7y ago

johanam 7y ago

Even in times of low traffic, patrol cars are known to slow down the flow of cars in order to induce congestion. They do it because when there are so many cars on the freeway, it’s safer if the vehicles move along slowly. It seems that with our current infrastructure, even if we could reduce the number of car users it would not be by such a margin that it would become safe enough to not have these “traffic breaks”. https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8 https://youtu.be/zOjYQTkrdl8

karthikb 7y ago
The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every 4-5 years.
- pfranz 7y ago
  It's just anecdotal, but I often saw it done in LA; weekly to monthly. Since I would get stuck in them I'd often seem them start or end them. I never once saw any correlation to road debris or emergency services. Any staging for construction or emergency services were done with a slow moving truck dropping cones or flares put down in a zipper-like fashion, corralling cars into open lanes or into exits.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    Yeah I see that kinda stuff at least a few times a year in the Bay Area. There's so much detritus on the roads I imagine they're just trying to remove the biggest of the hazards.
- bradlys 7y ago
  > The traffic break is usually used to scan the road for debris, or to create an opening for emergency services down the road to stage without having to completely shut the road down. Not typically used for flow management - having driven daily in SD, LA, and the Bay Area, I personally see it maybe once every 4-5 years. I've seen "traffic breaks" done to catch motorcyclists. Completely stops traffic with hundreds and hundreds of cars just to catch one guy speeding - not really worth it imo. Sometimes it's for debris but see plenty of pulling over too...

majormajor 7y ago

I can't read the article, but am very curious about how they accounted for overall growth. That new Expo Line tends to be pretty packed at rush hour. But that east/west commute continues to get more crowded overall. There have been ever-more apartments and offices opening up along that line for the past 6+ years, so it's no surprise traffic gets worse too.

pfranz 7y ago

Most of the article is behind a paywall so I couldn't read the whole thing. I hate the argument I often hear that "more lanes were added, time spent in traffic hasn't changed." As long as ridership is up, throughput increased while latency stayed the same. A public transit system takes decades of investment to see fruition. This really clicked for me when I was in London and saw a sign saying a transit stop was closed for the next 3 years. That has to be detrimental for the businesses, people renting, and real estate owners who were established there. A business lease averages 3-5 years. So you'd need zoning laws to change, real estate to be built, a business owner willing to commit to 3-5 years, and foot traffic and commerce. I can't imagine any infrastructure project that would improve traffic--only a recession.

drivingmenuts 7y ago

I consider The Economist to be a high-brow, high-status publication, but when I see them misspelling in the title, I have to reconsider. “Loth” is not a word. “Loathe” is the word they’re looking for. Find a better educated editor, y’all.

bwanab 7y ago
Loth is a valid British form of loathe: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loth https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loth
- Forgivenessizer 7y ago
  interesting. What will the boffins think up next?
- pasttense01 7y ago
  Doesn't The Economist change spellings between British and American editions? For example: "color"--American and "colour"--British?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bluGill 7y ago

That is expected, as any transit planner can tell you. Transit only makes a difference to traffic at the very edges of rush hour. For every person who gets out of their single occupancy car there is enough space for one person to leave just a little latter and still make it in time, which in turns leaves their space for someone else until finally you are out of rush hour entirely and there is nobody to take that time/space slot. Or to put it a different way: everybody wants to arrive to leave at 7:30am and arrive at 8:00am. (you can subtract a few minutes from the leave time for people who live close to work). Anybody working some other schedule (who has a choice of when to work) is doing it because they are avoiding traffic. Thus if transit makes traffic a little better someone on the edge will adjust their schedule to account for that and bring traffic back to where it was. Until you get to a city where rush hour lasts for 15 minutes transit will not make a measurable difference in time spent in traffic.

jessriedel 7y ago
In general yes, but in this case the trains are not being used: > Even as its budget has expanded, the number of people actually using public transport in la has collapsed. Total ridership is down almost a quarter since 2013. Three in four Angelenos travel to work on their own in a car, the highest figure ever.
- downerending 7y ago
  Recently stayed in a hotel in LA that had a direct view onto a light rail station. (Cool!) I glanced out the window from time to time over several days and never saw a single train. That suggests that they're not running often enough to be useful to real people. Train, bus, whatever--if I have to wait longer than eight minutes on average, it's useless. (And don't even get me started on the geniuses that decided that light rail shouldn't have an LAX terminal.)
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    We're you staying in Long Beach? That line was down for 9 months for a complete renovation.

whalesalad 7y ago

Trains can get you to like 2% of LA... that is why they're hardly used.

gamblor956 7y ago
Downtown, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena, long Beach, and Hollywood. So the important 2%.

blackrock 7y ago

Maybe they should just let the public transit riders ride for free? Those people will then bear with the hassles of using public transportation for the rest who needs to use their cars. The city might even see a surge in commerce, from people who can go to distant locations via public transit, that they wouldn’t otherwise bother going to by car.

bluGill 7y ago
Generally not. Most people are willing to pay a little for it, and people who pay for their service are harder to justify cutting service to when times get tight.

dkarl 7y ago

I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have taken 15 minutes by Lyft. About twenty minutes of that was spent walking and waiting in <40ºF weather, not a big deal if you're properly dressed, but I know that's something many people will not tolerate if they have a choice. Ten minutes of it was apparently due to unreliable service; Google Maps had me get off to make a connection and but quickly rerouted me to get back on the same line I was on (luckily high frequency, hence only 10 minutes lost) because the next bus on the connecting line was half an hour away. I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood. I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.

rayiner 7y ago
This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are under 30 minutes: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. Just 7% of public transit commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S. public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5% take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public transit): https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell.... I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
- 7y ago

cs702 7y ago

Any reduction in commute time due to new infrastructure, capacity increases, new technology, or other improvements, always proves temporary, as average commute times in large population centers gradually converge to Marchetti's Constant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant In the words of Bertrand Russell: "Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area -- effectually cancels out the gain."[a] See also: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-city-size-transportation-urban-planning-history/597055/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-... [a] As quoted on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant

helen___keller 7y ago
Another way of looking at it, building transit doesn't get anybody to work faster, but it does allow you to scale population density, which in turn allows you to build more housing for a region that may be in a housing crunch. If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour. Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.
carapace 7y ago
One of the wild things in Smil's "Energy and Civilization, a History" is that cars generally don't do better than walking if you factor in the hours spent working to pay for the expenses of owning and operating the car. Your total miles travelled per hour spent is roughly the same!

fastaguy88 7y ago

While there seems to be a lot of comments suggesting that no-one uses the LA metro because it's too short and too inconvenient, ridership statistics suggest otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr... points out that LA is the 9th most used subway system in the US, with riders/mile of subway beating out both the Washington DC Metro and Chicago's L, which are the 2nd and 3rd most heavily used subway systems. So while most of the commenter's here do not find it useful, about 140,000 people per day do use it, despite it being only 17 miles long.

bart_spoon 7y ago
Well given that LA is the second largest city in the country by population, that seems to support the idea that it’s heavily under utilized.

pacomerh 7y ago

I live in Culver City and go to work to Santa Monica using the expo line, and its perfect. But I do understand the routes do not cover important areas. There's still a big gap around West Hollywood for ex.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

api 7y ago

That's because LA is growing. It would be a lot worse without the trains.